Google Is Doing Layoffs and Their Employees Are Processing It on Instagram Now

March 16, 2026

A Google employee named Jason Zhang posted a video on Instagram recently after getting laid off. He shared an emotional video on Instagram after being let go, speaking candidly about the uncertainty and pressure he now faces while searching for another job. "I just got laid off from Google today. When I first got my offer three years ago, I thought I made it, not just for me, but also for my parents," he said. "As the only child from an immigrant family, I don't think so. I don't even know if I should tell them yet, because I know they will worry," he added.

I watched that video twice. And I want to say something unpopular: I think the fact that this is happening on Instagram now - the public grief, the identity processing, the job search documentation - is not a weird internet moment. It is the only honest response to a corporate situation that has been dishonest about itself for two years running.

Google has not had one big layoff. It has had a hundred small ones, and the slow drip is worse than a clean cut. That's what nobody in the press conference language wants to admit.

Let's Actually Talk About What Google Has Been Doing

Google's workforce reduction strategy has evolved dramatically since 2023, shifting from massive single-wave layoffs to continuous restructuring, voluntary buyouts, and targeted cuts. That sentence is doing a lot of work. "Continuous restructuring" is the corporate equivalent of saying the car is fine while smoke is coming out of the hood.

Here's the actual timeline. Google last made sweeping job cuts in January 2023, reducing its workforce by 12,000 roles, or about 6%. That was supposed to be the reset. The painful-but-necessary moment. In February of this year, Google revealed layoffs within its Cloud division, followed by cuts in April across the Platforms and Devices unit, which covers Android, Pixel, and Chrome teams. By May, roughly 200 employees in the Global Business Unit were let go.

Google laid off more than 100 employees from design roles within the company's cloud unit, with roles often focused on using data, surveys and other tools to understand and implement user behaviors - and has halved some of the cloud unit's design teams. Oh, and Brian Welle, Google's vice president of people analytics and performance, reportedly informed employees that the company now has "35 percent fewer managers, with fewer direct reports" compared to the same period last year.

Total estimated job losses from 2023 through 2025: 15,000 to 20,000+ employees.

That's not a restructuring. That's a slow evacuation. And they've been announcing it like weather updates - routine, procedural, spaced out so no single news cycle gets too loud about it.

The Instagram Thing Is Not the Problem. It's the Evidence.

Here's my actual take: Jason Zhang posting on Instagram is not embarrassing for Google's employees. It is embarrassing for Google.

When the company you work for has been cutting people in waves since 2023 and Google's transformation from a growth-at-all-costs culture to efficiency-focused operations has fundamentally changed employee expectations and company culture - with job security concerns replacing the traditional Google job-for-life mentality - what exactly are you supposed to do? Write a LinkedIn post in business casual? Quietly update your resume and pretend nothing happened?

Zhang was honest. He reflected on how closely his sense of identity was linked to his job. "Honestly, I don't have any hobbies, and I don't do much outside of work, so a big part of my identity was tied to my job," he said. That's a real thing a real person said out loud on the internet. I think that's more valuable than any official Google spokesperson statement.

Tory read about that video and said it sounded like a breakthrough moment, like Zhang was finally free to discover himself. Tory has been saying things like that a lot lately. I didn't push back. But I thought about it.

There's a version of this story where Instagram is a healthy outlet. There's a version where it's a symptom of companies having so completely dismantled the idea of institutional loyalty and two-way obligation that employees literally have nowhere else to go with it. I'm in the second camp.

A lone silhouette stands at the open hangar bay of a massive Star Destroyer, looking out into empty space as the ship continues forward without them, dramatic cinematic lighting and deep shadows — Wanted the image to feel like the ship just kept going. I think it landed - Tory said it looked sad, and I said that was kind of the point.

The "Efficiency" Language Is the Tell

Every single Google layoff announcement in 2025 has used the same word: efficiency. Google says the layoffs are part of an effort to run more effectively: "Since combining the Platforms and Devices teams last year, we've focused on becoming more nimble and operating more effectively and this included making some job reductions."

Google Cloud has been one of Alphabet's fastest-growing segments and continues to post record-breaking financial results. The fact that layoffs hit the cloud division despite strong performance is a powerful statement: this restructuring is not about saving a struggling business. It is about redefining what a high-efficiency, AI-first tech company looks like.

That's the part I want business owners to sit with. This isn't cost-cutting by a struggling company. Since the beginning of the year, the search giant has offered voluntary exit packages to many U.S.-based units across the company, eliminated more than one-third of its managers overseeing small teams, and recently began pushing employees to use more AI in their daily work.

They're not cutting because they're losing money. They're cutting because AI is making it possible to cut, and Wall Street rewards companies that cut. We wrote about this exact dynamic before - the idea that Wall Street's read on AI and software companies keeps missing the human cost of what these restructures actually mean at ground level. The Google situation is that argument made flesh.

This is also, by the way, the exact thing that hits differently at smaller companies. When Google does this, it barely moves their total headcount - although there have been further job cuts since then, Google's total headcount remains around 180,000 employees. When a 40-person B2B software shop decides to "operate more efficiently" by restructuring around AI tools, that's three or four people gone and the rest of the team wondering who's next. The Instagram moment isn't unique to Google. It's just more visible because Google employees have large followings.

The Crowdsourced Doc Is Actually the More Interesting Story

The Instagram video got more coverage, but there's something else happening inside Google that I think matters more for anyone running a team. According to an internal crowdsourced document shared among staff, at least 200 roles were cut - and the document this week revealed details that would otherwise remain unclear to many employees. The use of a shared document by employees highlights a growing demand for transparency. Many within Google are seeking clarity on the company's future strategy and priorities amidst these ongoing adjustments.

That's remarkable. People are building their own information infrastructure because the company's official communications aren't doing the job. They stopped trusting the memos, so they made a spreadsheet.

I think about this when I look at how we handle comms around anything uncertain - vendor changes, tool pivots, team restructures. We had that whole situation when the IoT platform we'd built on got sold out from under us, and the thing that made it survivable was that we talked about it in real time instead of letting people fill in the gaps with panic. The Google employees building their own internal transparency doc is what happens when leadership leaves a vacuum. People fill it. Usually with something messier than what you would have said.

What the Voluntary Exit Program Actually Signals

I'll give Google partial credit here. In January, over 1,400 Google employees signed a petition for the company to consider other strategies before it committed to laying off chunks of its workforce. It isn't apparent if the letter to the company was the determining factor in the company's decision to offer voluntary buyouts, but it likely had a role to play.

Google introduced a Voluntary Exit Program in January 2025 for U.S. employees in areas like search, marketing, hardware, and people operations. Fiona Cicconi, Google's chief people officer, called the VEP a success: "It's been quite effective," with 3% to 5% of eligible employees taking the offer, often for personal reasons like family or breaks from work.

3 to 5 percent took it voluntarily. Which means 95 to 97 percent did not. And then the involuntary cuts came anyway. Despite knowing that cuts were likely to come, it appears that more workers may have clung on to their jobs than expected.

I actually think about this like the scene in The Last Jedi where the Resistance fleet is just slowly losing ships, one by one, during the long chase sequence. Nobody's panicking in one giant moment - it's just attrition. Quiet. Steady. And the people on those ships know exactly what's happening and can't do anything about it. That's the Google situation. The voluntary buyout is Poe Dameron getting demoted - technically a choice, technically a process, and yet everyone knows the trajectory.

Stephanie asked me once what the difference was between a voluntary exit and a regular layoff. I said the difference is who feels better about it afterward. She nodded and said she'd never had to worry about something like that. I believe her.

What This Means If You're Running a Business (Not Google)

I'm not going to pretend this is just a Big Tech story. The pattern Google is running - drip-cutting teams, flattening management, pushing AI adoption as a justification for headcount reduction, announcing it in the blandest corporate language possible - that's a playbook that filters down. The white-collar AI panic is already in smaller offices, and the people running those offices are watching what Google gets away with and taking notes.

Jason Zhang going on Instagram isn't a millennial quirk. It's someone doing the only thing left when institutional channels fail: going direct. He said he plans to document his job search journey online. That's honest. That's real. And if the people on your payroll would sooner post a video to their 400 followers than send you a message, that's not a social media problem. That's a trust problem. It was a trust problem before Zhang ever hit record.

If you're not sure where your team stands on that - ask. Don't send a survey. Actually ask. The crowdsourced doc exists because nobody asked.

Chris read Zhang's post and said it was really brave. That's the thing about Chris - he always finds the most generous read. He's probably right. But I think it's brave in the way that people are brave when they've run out of other options. There's a difference.

Google keeps calling this efficiency. I keep thinking it looks a lot more like the slow unraveling of something that used to hold. They just announced it in small enough pieces that nobody had to say that out loud. Until Jason Zhang did, on Instagram, for anyone who was paying attention.